“We live in an era where we think nothing can really stun us anymore,” Barbara McQuade and Joyce Vance begin at New York magazine’s Intelligencer. Immigrant children separated from parents, a president ignoring a deadly virus, police violence against people protesting police violence, troops in the streets, foreign military assistance to a foreign government leveraged for campaign dirt, you name it.
As former United States Attorneys, the attorney pair’s immediate concern is the damage done to the Department of Justice by a president who spends more time on sculpting his hair each morning than he spends on the job of president. He treats the presidency as a private fiefdom and installed William Barr to run the DOJ as his personal lawyer and enforcer.
Justice under Barr is neither blind nor balanced, but weighted in favor of the president’s friends and tilted against his enemies. So said Aaron Zelinsky, an assistant U.S. Attorney in Maryland, before the House Judiciary Committee this week. Prosecutors had been told to go easy in sentencing longtime Trump ally Roger Stone.
McQuade and Vance write:
But we seem to live under a regime where the rules no longer apply to the president and those in his orbit. Trump has even told us this, declaring last summer, “I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president.” Yesterday, Zelinsky testified before Congress — along with Donald Ayer, former deputy attorney general under George W. Bush and John Elias, a senior career official currently serving in the Justice Department’s antitrust division — to insist that the rules should still apply.
We are living in a troubled time where people are faced with a daily struggle to protect their families. The words of a federal prosecutor may seem to involve a remote threat, but our most fundamental rights are at stake here. The decay at the Department of Justice impacts all of us.
“It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye,” the saying goes. Putting a thumb in the eye of federal bureaucrats seemed like good fun to Trump’s followers when the reality TV star with mafioso pretensions ran for president. Since then, a global pandemic has killed 120,000-plus Americans and put millions of others out of work. Trump couldn’t care less. He needs his adulation fix and doesn’t care how many corpses he steps over to get it. His administration seems bent on dismantling not just the American system of checks and balances, but his own party. He’s made over the wink-and-nudge party of white people as an overtly white-nationalist one.
The man who so famously hates losers is defending symbols of the Confederacy erected to memorialize slavery and treason.
Amidst reelection plunging poll numbers, Trump is not backing off, he’s doubling down. Not since George Wallace in 1968 has the country witnessed a presidential campaign this “nakedly racist,” writes Eugene Robinson. Inflaming racist tensions is the only play in his playbook.
“It’s almost as though Trump is determined to destroy the Republican Party,” Robinson decides. “Let’s give him his wish.”
Early Wednesday morning in Madison, Wis., white men stopped at a traffic light beside Althea Bernstein called her the n-word then set the 18-year-old EMT on fire:
According to the police report, Bernstein turned and saw four white men in another car. One of them sprayed a liquid that landed on her face and neck and tossed a flaming lighter at her, lighting her face on fire, she told investigators.
“She drove forward, patted out the flames,” the report states.
Bernstein suffered suffered second- and third-degree burns. Madison had just seen local protests against police brutality. Police are investigating the attack as a hate crime.
Perhaps just the everyday racial attack too common lately, or else part of the warp and woof of Trump’s white nationalism unleashed. And Trump’s presidential campaign has not even gathered steam yet.
With Trump’s poll numbers sliding, a defeat in the fall means Trump and his henchmen could face prison after he leaves office. Not in the federal system, maybe. Trump will try to head that off with pardons. But in New York and elsewhere. Which is why (we might surmise) Trump and Barr “recently launched a frontal attack on the US’s preeminent prosecutor’s office” in New York City.
“We live in an era where we think nothing can really stun us anymore,” McQuade and Vance write. Which is why a friend last night brought up the infamous Brooks Brothers Riot of 2000. Republicans flew political operatives to Florida to pose as average citizens protesting to shut down the 2000 vote count. The resulting chaos and U.S. Supreme Court action handed the presidency to George W. Bush. And Democrats acquiesced.
With Republicans faced with losing power across the country and Trump’s associates possibly facing criminal charges, what more might they do this fall to tip the election in swing states? What are believers in democracy and the rule of law prepared to do this time to stop them?
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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.